[X-Unix] CL Usenet and email

[William H. Magill]

On 14 Apr, 2005, at 05:13, Jamie Kahn Genet wrote:
> How many people, wonder actually use CL email and/or Usenet clients on 
> a
> day to day basis nowadays? Many of you guys? Hardly at all? Do the
> disadvantages of the CL interface outweigh the flexibility of CL input
> and scripting? Or the other way around?
>
> How realistic is it to expect to run such important parts of one's life
> by CL?
>
> Basically I'm wondering if I'm a bit silly to think of CL alternatives.

The correct question to ask is ... how many people use more than one 
operating system, especially different flavors of Unix.

The simple answer is ... ASCII and the Command Line tools are the only 
things which are guaranteed to work, and work the same way on all 
platforms.

I used emacs/rmail and Gnus for more than 20 years (and still use it 
occasionally) until OS X finally came out. I get a huge volume of mail 
and depend on procmail to sort it out for me into multiple inboxes. My 
email server is IMAP based and runs on Tru64 Unix. I can, and have 
used, mail.app with my IMAP server because I do get a large volume of 
crap and I find the built-in mail.app SPAM filter much easier to use 
for flagging suspect messages than any of the other things which simply 
delete messages so that I never see them!

The nice thing about command line tools is that you actually CAN know 
what they are doing. They don't "hide the headers" and other things 
trying to be "user friendly."

But then again, I've been supporting multiple flavors of Unix on 
multiple platforms for 30+years now and portability, support of Open 
Standards and consistency are far more important for me than "a pretty 
faced GUI." [And my fingers are much faster than having to move the 
bloody mouse all over the place all the time.]

T.T.F.N.
William H. Magill
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